· 15 June 2008 | 264 words
I ventured out recently into the blogsphere and discovered this meme via Sarx (with some links in the chain A and the original). if the nature of god is omnipotent, benevolent, and anthropomorphic (that god is a person, who sees...
· 1 March 2008 | 580 words
I occasionally venture into the blogsphere. About a week ago, I found this except posted by Julie from the book, Caring for the Dying With the Help of Your Catholic Faith by Elizabeth Scalia. I immediately copied and pasted it...
· 7 January 2008 | 85 words
Thomas Keating, in Manifesting God, says: "Worthiness is not the issue." Get over it. Stop projecting your own self-esteem issues onto God. God is God, not the god you make Him out to be. The Gospel is not about earning...
· 28 September 2007 | 616 words
Some quotations from Crisis of Faith, Crisis of Love by Thomas Keating that have been lanterns of hope along the path through the valley... The absence of the felt presence of The Lord is his normal means of increasing our...
· 28 July 2007 | 202 words
In Back to Virtue, Peter Kreeft links the virtues of the Beatitudes with the vices of the Seven Deadly Sins. The Beatitudes are the antidote to the Seven Deadly Sins, leading to life, not to death. Pride vs. Poverty of...
· 28 July 2007 | 358 words
The Beatitudes are linked together. They do not stand separately. The poor in spirit, those detached from the desire for worldly goods, must necessarily also be the pure in heart, since their heart is not split and set on many...
· 3 July 2007 | 298 words
In The Courage to Be, Paul Tillich writes (after page 148): The act of accepting meaninglessness is in itself a meaningful act. It is an act of faith. We have seen that he who has the courage to affirm his...
· 2 July 2007 | 579 words
I'm on page 148 of Paul Tillich's The Courage to Be. He has painstakingly described three types of anxiety that are part of being human (ontologically speaking). There is the anxiety of fate and death, of which the western ancients...
· 24 May 2007 | 245 words
As one has to learn to read or to practice a trade, so one must learn to feel in all things, first and almost solely, the obedience of the universe to God. It is really an apprenticeship. Like every...
· 24 May 2007 | 171 words
Affliction is a marvel of divine technique. It is a simple and ingenious device which introduces into the soul of a finite creature the immensity of force, blind, brutal, and cold. The infinite distance separating God from the creature...
· 14 May 2007 | 435 words
I'm bad about shopping for books. I cannot stop in a bookstore without rummaging through the religion/faith section. If a book looks good, I'll purchase it in hopes of reading it some day. Sometimes, I'll start the new book the...
· 22 March 2007 | 68 words
A poem from awhile ago reflects this line from Romano Guardini in The Lord: Love is a stream that flows from God to me, from me to my neighbor (and not to one only, but to all), from my neighbor...
· 22 March 2007 | 180 words
Romano Guardini, in his book The Lord, describes how it was supposed to be: God has shaped human life mysteriously indeed. Man's essence is meant to leap up to its God and return with the life it has [received] from...
· 20 February 2007 | 167 words
In The Lord, Romano Guardini reflects on God's forgiveness: Men actually did not know that God must be as he is in order to be able to forgive, for what they formerly meant by forgiveness was no true forgiveness, but...
· 13 February 2007 | 318 words
From James Finley's Merton's Palace of Nowhere, Finley quotes Thomas Merton: It is...a blindness to prayer that exposes us to the pitfalls of becoming ourselves like those, ...for whom a tree has no reality until they think of cutting it...
· 13 February 2007 | 196 words
From James Finley's Merton's Palace of Nowhere: In prayer we are "useless." We do not "do" anything, but rather open ourselves to be the person God calls us to be. The Moslems say, "God does nothing and therefore there is...
· 1 January 2007 | 342 words
I have had several people at different times tell me in counsel to "live my faith." I was usually struggling through something at the time, a bit lost and confused about certain things, and my initial response every time was,...
· 30 December 2006 | 178 words
In Merton's Palace of Nowhere, James Finley poses a most illuminating metaphor for explaining our search for a path along a spiritual journey. Although he is specifically describing the search for the true self, it aptly applies for the spiritual...
· 26 December 2006 | 152 words
Life is like a pearl: it needs a grain of sand at its center--death--as the irritant, the enemy, to stimulate the production of the mother-of-pearl of life around it. But death remains at its center. At the heart of...
· 9 December 2006 | 692 words
In Three Philosophies of Life, Peter Kreeft writes about three books in the Old Testament that essentially outline three ways to live and view life: Ecclesiates, life as vanity; Job, life as suffering; and Song of Songs, life as love....
· 27 November 2006 | 354 words
From today's entry in God Calling: Not our wills but Thine, O Lord. Man has so misunderstood Me in this. I want no will laid grudgingly upon My Altar. I want you to desire and love My Will, because therein...
· 23 November 2006 | 503 words
Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen wrote a wonderful little book called You, which is really about us and our relationship with God. Although the cultural references are a little dated, here is a cursory explanation, sprinkled with golden nuggets of insight,...
· 12 November 2006 | 121 words
From today's entry in God Calling: Jesus, hear us, and let our cry come unto Thee. That voiceless cry, that comes from anguished hearts, is heard above all the music of Heaven. It is not the arguments of theologians that...
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on us